My first computer used the AT-style keyboard and a serial port for the mouse.

Wow!, my first one was a Sinclair (some clone of the CZ Spectrum, an ooooold 8-bit computer with some kind of BASIC based shell) with no mouse at all, you need to plug it to the TV, 16k of ram and a 3.5Mhz cpu. I dont miss the 80s at all .

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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!

I don't know when he wrote the article, but OOo is in our repositories. It rubbed me the wrong way when he said, "While Abiword and Gnumeric are capable, you'll want the SOHO edition if you need OpenOffice.org." I've had OOo on 5.8 Standard since the beta days. Before we had it in the repositories, I probably got it from linuxpackages.net. I'd hope that someone reviewing a Slackware-based distro would be aware of that site, as well as slacky.it.

And of course, I said "Oh no, not again" when I read this: "I installed Vector Linux on an ancient HP vectra, a PII-450MHz box with 192MB RAM." Just once, I'd like to see a review of VL installed on a screaming new machine. We need to get out of the geriatric computers ghetto.--GrannyGeek

My understanding of "footprint" is the amount of memory (virtual and physical) a program takes when loaded. Thus to apply that term to a complete OS is perhaps not appropriate...but trying to follow the "train of thought" I suspect that would a reference to the amount of disk space that the OS takes when installed. For VL 5.8 Std. Gold it's around 2.5-2.8 Gb for a full install IIRC. For the current VL 5.8 SOHO RC3 it's a bit more than 3Gb on my machine. Obviously one can add or remove packages which will be an influence on the final amount.

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The plans of the diligent lead to profit...Pro. 21:5 VL64 7.1 RLU 486143

While it wasn't a full review by any means, I did get the chance to mention Vector as one of 4 brilliant distros that don't get the attention they deserve. I only had so many words in the interview so I had to keep them down. Those of you who know me might realize what a struggle that was. At any rate, I did mention you but only because it's true. Excerpt here, link follows:

OSWeekly.com: Was it a tough call to "sponsor" all distributions in a blanket effort instead of choosing the most popular options?

Ken Starks: No, not at all. In fact, I could not see it being done in any other way. I've "worn" this Advocate hat for almost three years, and if there is one thing I have learned, it's that some of the most stunning innovation is being done inside the smaller distribution communities. Take projects, such as Vector Linux, Elive, Nimblex and Sidux. All of these distributions have done some fairly amazing things to enhance their particular environment. While all of them are impressive, I would point in particular to Elive. The Enlightenment desktop isn't well known, but with the things this wizard has done to presentation, it takes both Elive and Enlightenment to an entirely higher level. No, this has to be inclusive of all efforts here. To do anything else would not serve the community as a whole.

Like I said, it was only a blurb, but with a slashdot audience, it can't do anything but help. Besides, I did not want the next question to be "What distro do you personally run"? Answering "Vector" and "Mepis" would have been a bit clumsy.

Last week, a reader emailed us this question: "Have you ever thought of the idea to analyse the HTTP headers the browser sends and use that to generate statistics of what people are using? That would IMHO be a much more interesting statistic." The simple answer is "yes". In fact this data is already available courtesy of the Awstats traffic analyser and can be accessed here.

The question has prompted us to extend the Awstats program to include other distributions that were not originally tracked by Awstats, at least those that provide a custom browser string which enables their identification; these include BLAG, Elive, Gentoo Linux, KateOS, Kubuntu, Linspire, MEPIS Linux, Linux Mint, Pardus Linux, PCLinuxOS and Vine Linux. These distributions were only added to the list on 29 April (before that, they were classified as "unknown/unspecified"), so the statistics for April are not accurate, but starting from next month, the page should give more complete data about the usage of the various distributions by the visitors of DistroWatch. However, web browsers of many other distributions, including those in Slackware, KNOPPIX, SabayonLinux, VectorLinux, Puppy Linux and Zenwalk, don't identify themselves in any distinct way, so we won't be able to count those.